The Media has Blind Spots, Not Biases

In July Congress passed a recission bill to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that allocates funds to local National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Station affiliates. In many regions these are the last remaining media sources providing local news coverage as local media organizations have been decimated by changes to the media ecosystem, resulting in news deserts in much of the country. Both corporate consolidation of media companies and the disaggregation of sources for information with TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and various other internet sites has put the national media environment in flux as well. Warner Brothers Discovery plans to spin off CNN and some of its other cable channels from its more profitable streaming business. 

The claw back of CPB funding is also only one instance in what has become a larger pattern of behavior in Trump's nascent second term. Earlier this year ABC settled a defamation lawsuit with President Trump for $15 million. The lawsuit stemmed from George Stephanopoulos colloquially describing then presidential candidate Trump as a rapist, when he was found civilly liable for sexual assault. CBS similarly settled a suit with President Trump for $16 million related to 60-Minutes editing of an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a promotional ad, despite this being normal practice and her full response being aired during the program’s regular broadcast. The Trump administration has also said they would select the members of the press pool, a responsibility normally held by the White House Correspondents' Association. Further, the Associated Press has been removed from the press pool for their refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

While past Presidents have bristled at the coverage they’ve received from the media, the actions of the current administrations are without precedent. These actions are, however, the logical conclusion of  a decade of attacks against the media from Trump. Since he began his first campaign for president, Trump has called the media “fake news” and escalated his attacks from there. 

Said another way, Trump is accusing the media of being biased against him. Like so much with Trump, this criticism is not original to him. Since this isn’t exactly a new argument, media organizations have addressed these criticisms. However, I think there is a component of this discussion that is often overlooked, so lets start by understanding the disagreement as it currently stands. 

Critics of the media argue that there is a liberal group-think or monoculture at the elite levels of our society. This includes the executives of media organizations who then guide the editorial decisions in the country’s newsrooms. It also includes the professors and administrators at universities that are not only educating and training the next generation of journalists, but also where scientific and sociological experts are sourced for stories, independent scientific research is conducted, and lawyers and judges learn their trade. Depending the individual making the argument the reasons for this elite’s bias towards the Democratic party ranges from a deep belief in the project of neo-liberalism; to being a part of and beneficiary of Democratic governance; to the true bias being against Trump specifically from a uniparty. 

The response to these arguments range from satirical snark, as Stephen Colbert quipped at the 2006 correspondence dinner that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”, to the more earnest that point out all the ways in which the media strives to be fact-based and unbiased. News organizations will publish corrections or publicly retract stories when they get something wrong in an effort to maintain trust and credibility. Further, when reporting on a story media organizations will ensure that both sides of an issue are fairly represented. 

These retorts have not only not quieted the criticisms of bias that, if were honest, are coming largely from the political right, but invited criticisms from the political left; specifically in regards to the last defense. Media observers point out the reductiveness of this defense. Because our political system has been reduced to a two party system our media views all issues through a conservative/liberal lens. 

You would be hard pressed to find an issue with only two sides, which suggests that media organizations are regularly determining which issue positions are legitimate and which are illegitimate. It is perfectly appropriate for a news organization to use this sort of editorial discretion. However, if the mechanism to determine the legitimacy of those positions is the bifurcation of our political system this would be an abdication of that news organization’s responsibility as journalists. Further, other issue positions might warrant individual examination by a journalist so as to not normalize that position by contrasting it with past or current policies, or other mainstream issue positions. This is a nuanced position, which is why journalists should be professionals with a set of standards and ethics guiding these decisions. 

It is also worth considering the motivation behind the accusations of bias within the media. To some extent this is projection—every accusation is a confession. The political Right has cultivated and benefited from a Conservative media ecosystem. While there are a great many benefits in this media ecosystem it also has a weakness, illegitimacy that comes from partisan bias. One solution to this problem would be to be less partisanly biased, but this would diminish the partisan benefits. The other solution is to attack the rest of the media as having a liberal bias. There can be no fact-based critiques or corrections from other media organizations of Conservative media if those are simply partisan attacks. And if they are caught towing the party-line? It's all part of the business, all media organizations do it. At least that's what they would like you to believe. 

There is a deeper cynicism here though. First, the type of fair and balanced reporting demanded by Conservatives was once a regulatory requirement enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This was called the Fairness Doctrine and it mandated that broadcasters devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance. It was Republican President Reagan's FCC repealed this doctrine in 1987 which lead to the rise of Conservative AM talk radio. Gone was the pretense of fairness on these Conservative talk radio shows. 

Almost a decade later Fox News would be created by Roger Ailes who worked in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush White Houses. It was in the Nixon administration that Ailes authored a memo outlining his desire to create a Republican news network to "avoid the  censorship, the priorities, and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators." This leads into the second point; given Fox News' position within the broader media ecosystem they are able to lend credibility to Conservative talking points and policy priorities. In this way Fox is able to strongly influence the editorial decisions of the other news networks so those news networks do not appear biased by not covering the stories that Fox News is covering. However, there is an asymmetry here; Fox is not at all interested in taking their editorial cues from the other media organizations. Remember, they've already eroded the public trust in media so they do not need to be worried about appearing partisan or biased. 

What is unfortunately lost in this debate is that there is a bias in media, its just not a partisan bias. For this reason I will call it blind spots to avoid confusion, and because I do not believe it is necessarily willful or intentional. This is not a critique of how the media covers stories but rather what stories the media chooses to cover. 

Part of this is the direct result of the hollowing out of local news organizations. Often it was the beat reporters in the small towns across America that would do the investigative legwork that would uncover a story of national importance to be picked up and elevated by the national news networks. Without this infrastructure of local reporters it is harder for larger organizations to identify the important stories. It is more difficult to report on how national policy making is affecting individuals in small towns across the country. It is that much harder to know what are the important issues in these areas.  

In practice this means that when someone listens to NPR or picks up the New York Times they will hear or see stories from DC and New York and will hear about national policy or a humanitarian special interest story from a faraway country. What they wont find is stories about their community, or a community like theirs, or even about the issues their community faces. This results in a kind of disenfranchisement, disengagement, and resentment. These communities view the media as wholly out of touch with their reality and so what relevance does the media have to these communities? What legitimacy does the media have to say what the important issues of the day are? What credibility does the media have? 

Compounding this feeling of resentment are the (in)famous "diner stories". Every four years journalist from the large news organizations fan out across the country in search of "real America" only found in the diners in "middle America" or "fly over country"—already you may be picking up a hint of condescension in how we refer to these communities. The journalists come to observe these voters as if they are some foreign culture to be studied and reported back to civilization. They will claim that understanding which issues are important to these voters is essential to understanding the "mood of the nation". But as soon as the ballots are cast the reporters retreat back in their studios, betraying a deep insincerity in the interest in these communities. 

Rebuilding the network of local news organizations is the obvious solution to this issue. Joshua Darr wrote for FiveThirtyEight, "a growing body of research has found that government is worse off when local news suffers. In fact, inadequate local news has been linked to more corruption, less competitive elections, and weaker municipal finances and a prevalence of party-line politicians who don’t bring benefits back to their districts... in the absence of local news, people are more likely to vote for one party up and down the ballot”. Short of rebuilding a robust local news environment, which would be a years long project, the national organizations need to take seriously their credibility gap in "middle America". Resources need to be put into covering these communities consistently, not once every four years. 

The Culture Warriors Are Fighting the Wrong Battles

I recently started reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and I was struck by something in the very first chapter; a sense of shared identity.  Mr. Vonnegut begins this book by relaying a story of the time he and a friend visited Dresden after the war. There they befriended the cab driver who took them to the slaughterhouse Mr. Vonnegut and his friend were held at night as prisoners of war. The cabbie had also served in WWII, on the German side, and was also a prisoner of war. Though on opposite sides of the conflict and having lived half a world away these three men shared an experience that, 23 years later, brought them together. Later, describing the time he spent writing as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau Mr. Vonnegut writes, "the very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war." 

"World War Two had certainly made everybody very tough," Mr. Vonnegut later concludes (emphasis my own). Mr. Vonnegut is writing anecdotally about post-war America which is an extreme case. At no other point in our history was the entire nation so mobilized towards a singular goal. Men were drafted; women stepped in to fill jobs at home to produce bullets, bombs, tanks, and planes; kids collected scrap metal; families rationed. The war was felt by everybody. An entire nation worked towards a singular goal, sacrificed to achieve it. 

In the decades that followed Americans would have a similar unifying struggle against Soviet ambitions. America and her allies airlifted supplies to West Berlin in one of the greatest logistical feats in history after the Soviets blockaded the city, only to see the Berlin Wall erected. Americans shared angst over Sputnik and gathered around their televisions with nervous excitement as Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface. Americans fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars. But Americans were not asked to sacrifice for these events. Not uniformly at least. The Berlin Blockade, Airlift, and Wall were events happening across the Atlantic. The space race was a competition between large government agencies. The Korean War was branded the "Forgotten War". Though a draft was enacted to fight the Vietnam War those with means fairly easily avoided being drafted. It was a war fought by the poor and disadvantaged Americans, and those who stayed home weren't asked to ration, collect scrap, or buy war bonds to support the war effort. 

Even in this time, however, America still has a shared sense of identity. Each town had it's selection of local papers delivered to each door every morning. Whether you wanted the community news, classifieds, sports, or funnies you had to flip through the other sections to get where you were going. You would see the news of the day. Whether you chose to engage with it or not was another matter, but at least you were aware. Radio stations were few and TV stations were fewer. If you weren't interested in watching the nightly news you likely caught the beginning or end of the program while sitting down to catch that evening's sitcom. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. 

 

This meant that everyone was listening to the same music, watching the same shows, seeing the same news. Now, in very many ways, this is a rose-tinted look back. What I am describing was controlled by and created for white, Christian, men. As I hope will become clear this is not a longing for this specific version of shared culture, more so a lamenting of the lack thereof (which I'll get into shortly). Furthermore, this is a literal whitewashing; entire economies existed to service the segments of society not catered to by this dominant mono-culture.

As those decades passed technology advanced, reshaping the media and cultural environment. With the growing popularity of FM radio and the Regan administration's rollback of the fairness doctrine, AM radio would become the domain of right-wing talk radio. Cable TV would give people 100 channels to choose from instead of 5. News would have its own, 24-hour, channels; music would have its own channel; history would have its own channel; and so on. TiVo and iTunes would make watching shows at their scheduled time or listening to the radio a thing of the past, but would quickly give way to streaming. The 90s Letterman vs Leno rivalry gave way to... silence. Citing decreased viewership and financial constraints CBS would be cancelling the Late Show in May 2026, the show once hosted by David Letterman.

Anymore the only shared cultural event that has to be viewed live is sports. While I don't know how this plays out, I think it is worth flagging that the rise of fantasy sports leagues and legalization of sports betting has diminished team fandom with people instead watching to see if they win their parlay or a player delivers on the fantasy projection. I think the jury is still out on whether this is good or bad in the context of shared culture.

This is all before considering the effect of social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok promised to bring people together, to create community, to be a virtual public square. What they have done through their algorithms is to provide endless personalized content that rarely has any connection to broader cultural trends, such as they are. If something does breakthrough it is fleeting, lasting a few weeks at most. What I see in my feed will be different from what you see in yours. 

This is a problem that will be amplified by AI. Content will be able to be generated in real time to cater to your preferences. Connection to reality, truth, or share experiences will be irrelevant, the only relevant question will be, "will this keep you engaged?"

 

At the same time, however, there has been some movement in the other direction. Walmart, Target, Amazon, Starbucks, McDonald's, Applebee's, and so many other chains like them have replaced the unique and distinct mom and pop shops and diners that used to populate every town. A corporate blandness and mediocrity that promises consistency whether you're walking into a store in New York City or Cleveland. To paraphrase Jon Lovett, Americans made a trade with these corporations, accepting uninteresting sameness for convenience and low prices. What we didn't account for was just how valuable the unique cultural oddities locally owned shops and restaurants are to their communities. 

 

In summary, we have exchanged what was a locally diverse and interesting nation that shared a common reality for a nationally uniform and uninteresting nation with no shared common reality. 

 

The Republican Party has many self-identified culture warriors. The current administration is filled with them. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is returning a Confederate statue to Arlington National Cemetery, renaming "woke" US Navy ships, and reverting the names of military bases to the names that had honored Confederate generals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked visas of students that have expressed "pro-Palestinian views" and will review the social media of student visa applicants. 

 

Earlier this week the Department of Homeland Security pushed a recruitment ad reading "serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!". 

In one sense I am a little confused but what is meant by "defend your culture". On the one hand, this is coming from the party of culture warriors, but they refuse to pass legislation regulating social media companies or AI; something that actually could, if done right, protect our culture. On the other, they have made it very clear (by their statements and actions) they mean white culture. 

You might think this is unfair, but the Vice President, JD Vance, is arguing that America isn't a nation founded on ideas. During a speech at the Claremont Institute on July 4th JD had the following to say (emphasis my own);

 

Every Western Society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal, or at least socially parasitic, that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there's nothing left. That's why the demographic trends across the West are so bad, why so many young people, historically high numbers in all European countries, say that they would not die for their own country, because something about the liberal project in 2025 is just broken....

 

But even so, if you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself.

 

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of independence, that's a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL (anti-defamation league) would label as domestic extremists. Even those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong. 

 

In this section of the speech JD is addressing the same lack of cultural cohesion, though he identifies different root causes; liberalism and immigration. Now it is worth taking this argument seriously because there are those who have arrived at this conclusion honestly. However, it is not worth taking JD seriously. This is a man who is serving as Vice President to a man he called "America's Hitler" and "cultural heroine". Furthermore, JD is standing up straw men arguments to easily knockdown to cosplay as an intellectual. 

 

No, I wont take JD seriously, but I will engage with the argument. It begins by saying a nation defined by an idea is too inclusive  and will change too rapidly, fragmenting it's culture. To that I would say, this has always been true of America. We were, in fact, a nation founded on ideals. A Frenchman could become an American in a way an American could never become a Frenchman. That was true at our founding and that is still true today. 

 

Further, there is a circular contradiction in this argument. If an immigrant believes in liberal self-governance they are culturally aligned with America, but in granting them citizenship it would fragment our culture so they shouldn't be granted citizenship. Not that anyone is seriously making the argument that every immigrant that believes in liberal self-governance should be made an American citizen, but that immigrant is more culturally aligned with America than a native born citizen making blood and soil arguments about nationality, for example. 

 

If there is a cultural through-line in America from our founding to today it is a culture of assimilation. It has not always been without its challenges; Irish immigrants, Chinese immigrant, German immigrants during WWI, Japanese immigrants during WWII, Central and South American Immigrants, Jews, Catholics, all faced various forms and degrees of xenophobia. The assimilation of these cultures, ethnicities, and religions has created a beautiful tapestry in this country with different musical styles, foods, and art. 

 

Lastly, what this argument does not consider or address is the fragmentation of information sources. The Trump administration has functionally halted all immigration to the country and our information sources are no better. He could be successful in deporting all non-citizens and it would not amend our information environment. He could remove all naturalized citizens and those that remain would still be in their information silos. 

 

I don't know what the solution to this is. To mix metaphors, we are so far down this road I'm not sure how we unring the bell. We are at a point in this country where we don't have a shared reality. Some would blame immigrants for diluting and fragmenting our culture. This is the tried and true tactic of othering individuals used by aspiring dictators. Reality has been so distorted that there are some that doubt whether the Holocaust occurred. I can't help but wonder if the loss of a generation so uniformly anchored in a single event has unmoored us. It seems that even shared experiences in which we were all asked to sacrifice like the COVID pandemic are quickly distorted through our fractured media environment.

Investigating the Narrative: How COVID-19 Saved Trump's Political Legacy

 Recently I wrote about how the 2024 election turned out to be a referendum election, with voters expressing a strong anti-incumbency sentiment directed against Democrats. Of particular salience to those voters was the economy. Although the rate of inflation had eased towards the end of the Biden Presidency and economic indicators were largely healthy, years of high inflation hurt personal finances. Voters did not believe Biden was doing enough to address high prices and so they turned their economic hope to Trump.

 Now that we are two and a half months into Trump's second term and Liberation Day has come and gone, eliminating trillions of dollars of wealth from the stock market in the process and sending the bond interest rate up as foreign investors pull their funds out of the dollar I thought a retrospective could be worthwhile. Not to the campaign; even though the tariffs ultimately imposed on Trump's Tariff Day were much more severe than he signaled during the campaign, anyone paying attention would have told you that Trump was committed to the policy of universal tariffs and it would be detrimental to the economy. 

Further, Trump's other policies, namely, mass deportations, would be a drag on the economy as well. Immigrants work jobs in America that Americans are unwilling to work and at rates that Americans would be unwilling to work for. Further, they are paying taxes into a system which they know they will not be the beneficiaries of and are consumers in our communities. To be clear, this is not an endorsement of our current system of immigration and the treatment of migrant labors in this country, but Trump's solution is not only inhumane, its economic self-harm. 

No, I do not want to look at what the campaign positions were because most Americans were not paying attention. They felt the impact of inflation and remembered back to the last time the economy was good, under Trump in his first term. Trump is more than willing to reinforce this belief, claiming the American economy was the best the world had ever seen before COVID, so lets take a look at a few of those claims. 

Staring with unemployment. Trump will claim that he is the reason for strong employment numbers from 2016 through to the beginning of 2020. To be sure, the unemployment rate was historically low, but looking at the unemployment rate since 2007 there is no clear indication of when Obama's presidency ended and Trump's began. In fact, the unemployment numbers continue on a steady trajectory that began under President Obama.

Next, looking at inflation. Trump has claimed that America has no inflation during his first term. While that is obviously false, inflation was within the traditional healthy band of 1% - 3% during his presidency. But this too was the range for much of the preceding eight years.

Lastly, looking at Gross Domestic Product. Not only will Trump brag about the number of jobs he created, but the economic growth the nation enjoyed during his first term. Again, Trump is not wrong, GDP growth was strong. Again, however, this was a clear continuation of a trend that began under the Obama administration.

Importantly, when examining these graphs, I have been omitting 2020; we see unemployment spike, GDP crater, and inflation start to rise in 2020 while Trump is still President. However, this was the direct result of the global shutdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A global pandemic is hardly the fault of Trump, and the response to the crisis from other foreign leaders was far outside his control. Though I think Trump is to blame for many mistakes he made during this period, a global economic crash is not one of those mistakes. So thought I think it is fair for Trump to claim that up-to 2019 he oversaw a strong economy, though one might channel President Obama and retort, "you didn't build that!"

Now, you may have noticed that I said "up-to 2019"; if we were to look closely at the GDP graph above we can see there is a slight dip in 2019 just before the pandemic lock downs took effect. So lets look into that dip and what caused it.

From his first term Trump is able to claim only a very few policy achievements; among them his tax cuts and tariffs against China. At the time I argued against both of these policies. Turning to the tax cuts first. Trump's tax cuts largely benefited the upper class, with some moderate cuts for the middle class and fewer for poor Americans. At the time the argument was that the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis overseen by the Obama administration was too slow and what was holding back the economy was high tax rates on corporations preventing them from investing in research & development, capital improvements, and their workers. 

There are a few problems with this line of argument though. First, part of the reason the recovery was slow was because Republicans in Congress insisted on austerity measures to cut government spending in order to get the federal deficit under control. Then President Obama argued that with historically low interest rates now was the time for the government to borrow money to kick start the American economy, any deficit spending would be paid back at a lower interest rate. Republicans rejected this form of direct government stimulus and instead, eight years later, would run a deficit when interest rates were higher to stimulate an economy that had largely recovered from the earlier financial crisis. 

Second, in the years leading up to the ratification of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) corporate cash on hand was increasing; a strong suggestion that high tax rates were not hobbling corporations' ability to generate cash which they could then invest in their businesses. 

Further, corporate merger and acquisition activity had been increasing leading up to 2016, again suggesting companies had no problems investing prior to the tax cuts.

These were the arguments I made before the TCJA was enacted. After ratification businesses took the additional profits from their reduced tax liability and repurchased their own shares at record levels. These stock buybacks do not benefit the workers of these companies or improve productivity and efficiency, they instead benefit the corporation's shareholders–importantly the executives who receive stock compensation. 

Now turning to tariffs on China. Trump's justification for placing tariffs on China was because they were manipulating their currency and had unfair labor practices which disadvantaged American companies and workers, resulting in a trade deficit. He had me until the trade deficit because, well, Trump does not actually understand trade deficits. An important piece of context; at the same time that Trump was railing against Chinese economic practices he torpedoed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which would have created an economic framework between the United States and 11 other nations–Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. This agreement in particular would have given President Trump significant leverage to negotiate different trade terms with China.

Furthermore, Trump pulled out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico. We could have a debate on the merits of NAFTA, but what replaced it, the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement was not wholly different from NAFTA meaning we strained our relationship with too of our closest trading partners to put back in place the same deal which existed before.

Trump expressed that his goal was to get China to change their trade practices and we have every reason to believe that was his intent. However, the better approach would have been to gather our allies in Europe and the Pacific and as an economic block impose tariffs on China. Instead Trump started a trade war with China that China was able to navigate around because we were acting alone. 

This sets the stage and lets us come back around to the dip seen in GDP in 2019. Looking at industrial production specifically we can see this drop off, well before COVID.

 And zooming in on 2019 we can more clearly see this decline.

What this graph shows is that the US manufacturing sector was in a recession 2019 and it was a direct result of Donald Trump's trade policies. While the TCJA may have delayed this recession, it was not enough to prevent it all together. 

At the same time US farmers were going bankrupt at the highest rate since the 2008 financial crisis. Again the TCJA was not sufficient to offset the losses due to the trade war with China and the Trump administration stepped in to provide additional relief in the highest level of subsidies to farmers in 14 years. This, again, was a direct result of Trump's economic polices. 

So where does this put us at the end of 2019; our manufacturing sector is already in a recession and farmers are going bankrupt at elevated levels, but before these weaknesses were able to spread throughout the economy, resulting in a general recession COVID-19 effectively shut down the global economy. As a result, the economic turbulence that followed was blamed on COVID and not Trump's policies. This allowed Trump to return, four years later, after inflationary pressures and pitch a return to the period of his economic prosperity. No one had realized that when we tried his economic policies the first time they had failed.

The Myth of The Moderate

Since Kamala Harris' defeat to President Trump Democrats have been rudderless. Tune in to any cable news channel, however, and you will hear a political pundit opine that the solution to the Democrat's woes is to moderate. In fact, the solution for any given politician or political party struggling electorally at any given time is to moderate. A brilliant solution, if it were so simple! You might listen a bit longer, waiting to hear how exactly the Democratic party should moderate, but what you will invariably hear is what amounts to little more than platitudes—"we need common sense reform that all Americans can get behind"; or "we need to speak to the real America, not the coastal elites"; or "we need to appeal to the median voter" which is really just defining the approach with the approach. 

Looking at the problem superficially a play for the middle does seem strategically sound. After all, our political system is structured as a competition between two parties that stake out positions on the opposite end of the spectrum on any given issue. It's reasonable then to assume that the party closer to the center of an issue will be able to gather more support on that specific issue. Do this across all issues and you have a winning platform. At least in theory. 

 

If you start to press, however, this theory starts to break down. So lets press. There are two ways in which a party can moderate; in issue stance and in issue selection. Issue stance is how a party positions themselves on a specific issue, whereas issue selection are the issues that a party chooses to prioritize. While neither issue stance or issue selection is immutable for political parties—priorities and policies change over time—it is not as straightforward as simply declaring a change in position.

Looking first at issue stance; the calculation in shifting positions on an issue is that some base voters may be lost, but by shifting positions more than enough voters will be gained to offset any losses. This too is true in theory but there is a very practical risk in this strategy. If a shift in position is not ideologically consistent with the broader set of policy objectives then more base voters may be lost. Further, if the shift is viewed as disingenuous political pandering the moderate voters the party is courting may not be swayed. An example of this may be the Biden, then Harris, campaign's shift to a tougher immigration policy. Right leaning voters saw this as nothing more than a political calculation for the upcoming campaign and Democrats were left trying to rationalize how the harsher immigration policy fit in their broader social justice framework. 

Further, this approach is only possible if the current political dynamic of an issue allows moderation. Take the issue of abortion as an example. If one party has taken the position that life begins at conception and all abortion is murder then to moderate is to legalize murder. Democrats can put all the restrictions they like in place but so long as the opposition believes there should be no exceptions there is no middle ground. You can run down a list of issues like this; you cannot moderate from the position of denying the existence of trans-individuals, or that homosexuals do not deserve the right to marry, or that immigrants do not have basic legal rights. 

It is also worth pointing out that there is a difference between the midpoint between the policy positions of the two parties and the true moderate position. For this let's look at health insurance as an example. The current Democratic position is somewhere between the current status quo with a government health insurance option to compete with private insurers and additional regulations, such as requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions. The Republican position is to eliminate the public option and deregulate. In this instance the Democratic party is already around the true moderate position with Republicans solidly on the conservative side of the spectrum. This shifts the Overton Window to the right half of the political spectrum. So if by moderate we mean to pick the midpoint between the parties current positions it would mean for the Democrats to move to a center right position. If we mean to select the true moderate position then the Democrats are already there.

Already it has become extremely unclear what it would mean for either party to moderate. Do their current political positions allow them to moderate? Even if they can moderate, should they? What if they already hold the moderate position, should they compromise further and move to the midpoint? 

These questions only become more muddled when moving from evaluating individual issues to evaluating issue selection. Is a party to moderate on all issues or only social issues? All social issues or just some social issues? Should the party moderate on some social issues, some economic issues, and some foreign policy issues? 

 

If you were to survey 100 voters on their positions on issues you will get 100 different variations. Herein lies the problem that the call for moderation ignores—voters are complex with unique lived experiences informing their individual political perspective. The idea that a moderate candidate will look the same to every voter, or even a plurality of voters, is absurd. 

There is no moderate ideal for the parties to attain. Even if we were able to come to a consensus on what the moderate ideal is it is not clear to me that in a two party system this would be the political juggernaut that pundits suggest it would be. The instinct of this commentary is correct, though. We should be striving for the most broadly representative government possible. The problem is attempting to achieve that goal within our current framework. A two-party system requires voters to compromise on certain positions to vote for the party that most closely aligns with their beliefs, or vote against the party that most greatly diverges from their beliefs, or they choose not to vote at all. What is needed is a multiparty system that allows for a greater diversity in issue stance and issue selection. This wont create a moderate party, but it will the representation of voters beliefs.

The Great American Hypothesis: Multi-Cultural Democracy

America was a country founded on a set of principles; equality, personal liberty, freedom, independence, democracy. These principles were, from the very beginning, aspirational. Virtues we, as a country, should strive for; not something that had been achieved when the words were written. The Founders grappled with the contradictions that existed in our founding ethos; that all men are created equal while slavery persisted in the fledgling nation. While they did not themselves embody all of the ideals they espoused it does not make those ideals any less virtuous, or excuse later generations from striving to uphold those same virtues because their predecessors may have fallen short. 

Certain of the Founders believed that future generations may have different interpretations of what these principles look like in practice, or maybe hold different principles all together. Thomas Jefferson advocated for the Constitution to expire after 19 years, to be renewed or created anew by the next generation. Though we did not adopt Jefferson's approach, for practical reasons, subsequent generations have interpreted and reinterpreted the founding principles time and again. 

George Washington called the undertaking of the new American government a "great experiment". This phrase would evolve into "the great American experiment in democracy", I would call it "the great American hypothesis of democracy". Even at our founding we were a diverse nation with Europeans, American Indians, and Africans living in one country. However, only a narrow band of that population was given the rights of full citizenship, namely the white protestants. And even within that population voting rights were, with few exceptions, granted to a narrower band still—land-owning, tax-paying males. 

Even for these select few afforded the right to vote, the Founders did not trust the masses to elect their leaders. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1 (emphasis from me);

An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. 

To this end, the Founders believed it wise to remove the election of the President from the general populous and placed that responsibility with electors. States are responsible for administering federal elections and initially the election of those electors was primarily the responsibility of state legislators. Over time states shifted from state legislator appointed electors to electors determined by popular vote. 

Even with this shift towards democratization, well over half of the US population still was not eligible to vote. It would not be until the passage of the of the 15th Amendment in 1870 until the right to vote was extended to all adult males. However, this newly extended right was very quickly curbed with the passage of Jim Crow laws in states across the country. In 1920 the 19th Amendment was adopted extending the right to vote to women. 94 years after all men were given the right to vote through the 15th Amendment, the 24th Amendment was passed prohibiting poll taxes as a barrier to voting and provided Congress the authority to enforce this article through appropriate legislation. A year later the Voting Rights Act would ensure the right to vote for all US citizens. 

While the story of suffrage in this country is frustratingly slow and riddled with setbacks, it is an illustration of the aspirational nature of our founding principles. While we have made significant progress towards democratization and though we think of ourselves as the quintessential democracy, much like at our founding, I would argue that this is still aspirational; thus a hypothesis and not yet an experiment.

I would like to take a brief detour, if you stick with me I think it will come together in the end. I will also apologize in advance for some vulgarity. 

Back in 2004 George W. Bush was running for reelection against John Kerry. The same year South Park was in its 8th season and the week before election day they offered their take on the current state of American politics in episode 8, Douche and Turd. In the episode the residents of South Park are in the process of selecting a new school mascot and are given the choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Maybe not the subtlest allusion to American politics, but an incisive critique nonetheless. 

Two years later It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia would air The Gang Runs for Office (Season 2, Episode 8). In the episode the gang has the following exchange;

Mac: Hey, have you guys seen this? We are getting blasted in the ass by the state liquor tax. 

Dee: "Blasted in the ass"? 

Dennis: Mac, we have this same conversation every year. There's nothing you can do about taxes. 

Dee: You guys might want to think about voting every once in a while. 

Dennis: What has voting ever done? 

Charlie: Why Since... wh-what has... Why are you comin' down... Voting!?

Dennis: Who am I supposed to vote for? Am I supposed to vote for the Democrat who's gonna blast me in the ass or the Republican who's blasting my ass? 

Mac: Politics is just one big ass blast. 

Dennis: It is a coast-to-coast, nationwide ass blast.

These episodes that aired only two years apart captured a similar vibe; there is no real difference between two self-interested parties. A vibe that persists among voters still, though I think the characterization has since broken down. 

In the 20 years since these episodes aired the political landscape in America has changed dramatically. For the first time in our nations history we did not have a peaceful transfer of power when, on January 6th 2021, outgoing President Trump incited a mob to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election. Trump was impeached twice, though not convicted, and indicted on four separate counts. In 2024 Donald Trump would run for president for a third time. To update the South Park analogy for 2024, the choice would be between a giant douche and an arsenic sandwich—both bad, but one will kill you.

Democrats warned that, if elected, Trump would represent democratic backsliding towards authoritarianism in America. Since taking office Trump has validated those warnings as he has violated the Impoundment Control Act by freezing funding allocated by Congress; violated civil service protections by firing civil service employees without appropriate cause, ignored court orders to resume funding, and countless other lawless acts. 

It would be too much to say that America is an autocracy; the 2024 election was free and fairly administered and there is currently not strong reason be believe that the 2026 mid-term elections will not also be free and fairly administered. However, I think we have seen enough to declare that the great American hypothesis that a large and diverse multi-cultural democracy is not possible. At least as our political systems are currently constructed. 

In a two-party system, when one of the parties has abandoned the democratic process, as the Republicans have, it leaves pro-democracy voters with a single option. When there is a single legitimate option there is no choice, and where there is no choice there cannot be democracy. 

It would be too much to say that America is an autocracy, but we are no longer a democracy.